Facebook’s Messenger might be costing you gigs

In the midst of responding to a silly amount of Facebook messages a few weeks ago I began poking around some settings waiting for replies. Hmm, ‘Message Requests’, that looks interesting…

Oh crap. Almost an entire week had passed already.

Son-uva!!!! Did I miss her first message? I’m usually pretty good with this type of stuff. No, there was no way I missed this, it would have popped up on my phone until I checked it.

Damn, Facebook just cost me a couple hundred bucks.

But wait there’s more! There’s a second level of this wormhole. Ever heard of ‘Filtered Requests’? Me neither. After further investigation I discover messages over the past SEVEN YEARS that I never saw and obviously did not respond to. Inquiries I would have loved to engage on.

What an asshole I am.

Turns out, anyone who tries to message you on Facebook that is not already your friend goes into the black hole of ‘Message Requests’. And bless your lucky charms, if Facebook determines that it’s some type of spam, they’ll throw it further down the rabbit hole into ‘Filtered Requests’.

Determined to never let this happen again, I scour for an option to turn on notifications for such enquiries. From what I can find, there is no option.

Gotta be shittin me.

They’ve got a way to blow up your phone every time Uncle Chuck’s pigs in FarmVille die of typhus, but no way to let you know someone just reached out to you with meaningful communication.

So until Facebook gets their act together, I set up a weekly reminder to check these phantom inboxes via Google Calendar. It’s crude and somewhat wasteful, but not nearly as wasteful as missed gigs. Or looking like an asshole.

And wouldn’t you know, the first week into my ‘Message Request’ rounds I unearth this little parcel.

Seriously folks, you can’t afford not to regularly check these tabs.

Gigs are difficult enough to come by and I’ve totally dropped the ball in the past. This got me thinking of a roundup post idea. Over the coming weeks I’m going to brainstorm and lay out all of the way’s I’ve botched a gig and what I’ve done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.